You pay your rent. You go to work everyday. You’re faithful to your boyfriend/ girlfriend. You visit your grandma in Boca. You’re a good person. And you’re tired of being good.

Enter Evil Twin, a new monthly party where you throw your inhibitions to the wind and get stupid. Basically you come to the party as your own evil twin. If you like to wear white shirts, wear black. If you like to wear black shirts, wear no shirt. If you like to drink beer, drink gin. If you like to drink gin, take ketamine.We play the music, a mix of evil hop-hop and dark and menacing dance music. A bass-heavy backdrop for you to lose yourself and make decisions that would appall your normal self. We will have a live video artist with an evil instrument used for projecting graphic videos. They may include but are not limited to depictions of sex, drugs, and taking drugs while having sex.

Admission and booze are cheap to facilitate evil behavior. Facial disguises are encouraged so colleagues and classmates can’t implicate you. If you are evil and have already killed your good twin, you can come as your extra evil triplet$5 Sailor Jerry dark & stormy drink specials will be served at the bar from open to close to help facilitate the release of your inner evil twin.

The deep fried oysters served with crispy shoestring fries at Umi Nom totally blew me away with their crunchy, warm, creamy, oyster-y-ness. There was no need for the creamy sweet and sour dipping sauce which was served alongside the oysters. I’m sad to report, however, that these were a daily special, and not a regular menu item, though if I lived closer to Umi Nom, I’d be petitioning their addition to the regular menu relentlessly.

Chef King Phojanakong’s Brooklyn restaurant Umi Nom is a solid second offering from the man who brought us Kuma Inn on the Lower East Side. Umi Nom’s cuisine reflects Chef King’s influences, ranging from the home cooking of his Filipino mother and Thai father to the French techniques he picked up in other esteemed NYC kitchens (Daniel, Bouley Bakery, Jean-Georges).

Umi Nom is a place to go with a group of friends and order several small plates to share family style. If you order an average of 1.5 to 2 small plates per person, everyone should be satisfied (but make sure you include a rice and/or noodle dish for something a little more substantial).

Our dinner began with a crab rangoon amuse-bouche, fried wontons filled with cream cheese and crab. I’ve never met a crab rangoon I didn’t like, so it probably means little that I enjoyed this one, but free crab rangoon? Somehow more delicious.

Next up were the Umi Nom crispy wings, deep fried wings tossed with salt and Anaheim chilies. I prefer sauceless wings to saucy ones, so these were a big hit with me, especially with the chili kick (though I wish they had given me more chilies on the side).

The Bahay Kubo fried rice was fairly standard in terms of fried rice. It consisted of chicken, sausage, and shrimp stir-fried with white rice, egg, garlic, and soy sauce. Nothing to write home about as it was not particularly memorable, but it was a good stomach-filler since some of the other small plates were smaller.

We ordered another daily special – the pork belly adobo. The heavily charred pork belly was served with a soy, garlic, tomato, and adobo chili sauce and a sprinkling of green onions. I like my pork belly slices to be thick and juicy with a nice fat to meat ratio, and while the pork belly was very good, they could have done better by making the cuts just a little thicker and reducing the char a bit. Some char is nice, but too much makes for tough meat, and pork belly should really melt in your mouth. Still, I’d order this again as I feel like ours may have been just an off-batch. The sauce was fantastic!

Let’s revisit the deep fried whole oysters here again for a moment. Maybe even observe a moment of silence.

*Silence*

Food nirvana. THISCLOSE to being as good as the deep fried whole-bellied clams I had at Red’s Eats in Wiscasset, Maine over the summer. THISCLOSE.

On to the beef. We ordered ma-banh’s beef tapa, a dish of fried, thinly sliced dried beef served with a smoked adobo (?) and chipotle chili sauce. Basically, hot beef jerky. If you’re into that, you’ll like this. If you’re like me, you might want to pass.

We also enjoyed the sauteed sweet sausage in a Thai chili-lime sauce (but it was so popular that I forgot to take a pic of the kielbasa-like sweet sausage cut on the diagonal) and a passable (but also forgettable) pancit canton.

What I really want is to find someone’s Filipina tita to make us some pancit and some chicken adobo in her kitchen at home. Anyone want to lend me a Filipina aunt/mother/grandma for a day?

Southern-inspired cooking at this well-loved Brooklyn eatery has been praised by NY foodies and food critics many times over. The Seersucker Tuesday night fried chicken special is already popular, and now they’ve introduced $17 Meat & 3 Mondays. There’s a menu of meat specials (meatloaf, country ham, stew, etc.) and sides (collard greens, grits, mac & cheese, green bean casserole, etc.). You pick one meat and three sides. Simple, right? The hard part is going to be deciding what to pick. They’ll also serve cornbread and all you can drink sweet tea. The menu changes weekly, but you can check out Zagat here to see what the usual fare is like. If that’s not enough to get you there, Dixie Beers are just $3.

Brooklyn Bridge Park runs a fabulous summer outdoor movie series called Movies with a View on Thursday nights in the summer, weather permitting. You get to watch movies under the Brooklyn Bridge against the backdrop of the Manhattan skyline… it’s one of those summertime things that makes me feel incredibly lucky to live in the city. I haven’t gotten around to going this summer yet, but there’s a DJ from 6 pm onwards, and the movies go on at sunset, usually around 8:30 or 9 pm. Tonight, I’m going to watch Blues Brothers armed with bread, cheese, grapes, olives, beef jerky, and other delicious snacks. Get there early to stake your claim on some lawn space and picnic until the sun goes down.

As such, I’ve been contemplating ways to shed the cream and butter winter weight and trim up a bit. Memorial Day Weekend is just around the corner and then it’s rooftop barbecues and tanning in the park and the pools (yes, the POOLS in NYC!) are opening soon. Apparently, Groupon thought lots of people might be in the mood to get their beach bods ready. I received an e-mail today inviting me to buy a one-month gym membership to Crunch for $39. $39! A Crunch membership usually costs over $100 a month, so this is a great deal. Of course, it’s limit one per person, new members only, and they will probably harass you to join at full price after your one-month trial. The upside is that you pay no membership fee, it’s cheap, and it’s a one-month commitment so if you lose your drive to work out after a month, you’re not locked into a recurring monthly fee.

I’ll be splitting my time between the Lafayette and Union Square gyms, but there are seven Manhattan and two Brooklyn locations participating.

Full disclosure: if you make a Groupon purchase through the links above and you haven’t before, I get a $10 Groupon credit. However, I am not posting so I can accumulate Groupon credits; I really think this Crunch deal is a good value and it is perfectly timed.

My mom came up from Virginia to visit me a little while back, and she and I spent the weekend together gallivanting about town, going to wine bars at midnight, and even checking out some apartments for sale in Brooklyn. As we were walking up Graham Ave. towards the train station, we happened upon a bustling pizza place, and upon recognizing it as Motorino, I popped in for lunch with mom.

The fire-roasted mortadella salad ($7) is fantastic. The mortadella is cut into thick strips, grilled over a hot fire, and tossed in olive oil with olives, tomatoes, basil, red onions, some bitter greens, and topped with parmesan cheese.

I really like it when these sort of low-brow cured meats (bologna, mortadella, ham) are cut into cubes or thick steak fry-like strips and then grilled or fried. It makes them seem fancier somehow. Joe Doe did these fantastic fried bologna fries with mustard dip as a small plate during their happy hour over the winter. Not sure if he still does it, but if you should see it on the happy hour menu, make it a point to try it.

I know pizza napoletana is supposed to be personal size, but I find them pretty filling, so I usually share a pizza and an app. I was really excited to try out the Motorino pizza. I’d heard awesome things about it, so I pored over the menu, and finally selected the Pugliese pizza ($16): burrata (a fresh Italian cheese made from mozzarella and cream), broccolini, sausage, fresh chilies, and garlic.

I wasn’t all that impressed. The pizza was fine, but not mind-blowing or even memorable, save for the broccolini, which I’ve never had as a pizza topping. They were stingy on the sausage, and the cheese and broccolini weren’t inherently salty, so the pizza was bland. I liked the crunch of the broccolini, but there could have been more garlic and chili – it wasn’t spicy at all, which is what I hope for when I order a pizza with fresh chili peppers. Also, the center of the pizza got quite soggy as the meal progressed, and by the time we got to the last slice, it was rather unappetizing.

I am willing to admit that perhaps my choice of pizza was unconventional, and perhaps it was not the best example of a blissfully delicious Motorino pizza. But with Keste, Pulino’s, and San Marzano (San Marzano has a great happy hour from 5-7 pm daily, too) so close to where I live and work, I doubt I’ll make the trek back to Brooklyn for their pizza. I am, however, intrigued by the idea of a brunch pizza served with an egg, though the one at Motorino looked mighty soggy as other patrons attempted to eat it. It was only $10, though. Or maybe I’ll just try the brunch pizza at Pulino’s instead. There is an East Village Motorino location now, and one of these days I’ll check out their margherita to set the bar.